International Academic Competitions welcomes homeschooler participation, and we hope to see many homeschooled history fans at our regional, state, and national tournaments!
Homeschoolers may compete in one of four ways as a team in The National History Bowl, as explained here:
1. Preexisting homeschool associations may send teams made up of all students in their associations. Associations, however, are limited to 5000 students in grades 9-12; if your association is larger than this, you must “divide and conquer” as per one of the other two strategies as discussed below.
2. Homeschoolers may compete with the regular (i.e. non-magnet) public schools within the district the homeschooler lives. Once a student has played with a particular school, however, the student must play all subsequent tournaments for that academic year with that school unless the student’s family moves during the academic year.
3. Homeschoolers may compete with other homeschoolers from the same county (no matter what the population), or with homeschoolers from neighboring counties, as long as all counties border each other contiguously, or are in the same state where the state population is less than 3,000,000. For jurisdictions that do not have counties, contact IAC for an ad hoc ruling on this question before registering.
4. Homeschoolers may play as a “team” of 1 student, just the same way this is permissible for students in schools.
Additionally, homeschoolers can certainly compete on an entirely equal footing in the National History Bee and our other individual events. To determine grade eligibility, if a student is not considered to formally be in a grade, then for the 2024-2025 academic year, students born on or after October 1, 2008 will be considered to be eligible for the Junior Varsity Division. If a student is formally considered to be in a grade, then that grade is what will be used.
For further questions, please contact us at hs-info@iacompetitions.com.
Good luck, and we look forward to welcoming many homeschoolers and their teams to our tournaments this year!